Hacker News Reader

Comment by anonymous908213 | Hacker News Reader

Yes. This is being treated as thought it were a mistake, and oh, humans make mistakes! But it was no mistake. Possibly it was a mistake on the part of whoever was responsible for reviewing the article before publication didn't catch it. But plagiariasm and fabrication require malicious intent, and the authors responsible engaged in both.

View on HN

> Possibly it was a mistake on the part of whoever was responsible for reviewing the article before publication didn't catch it

My wife, former journalist, said that you don’t direct quote anyone without talking to them first and verifying what you’re quoting is for sure from them. The she said “I guess they have no editors?” because in her experience editors aren’t like fact checkers but they’re suppose to have the experience and wisdom to ask questions about the content to make sure everything is kosher before going to print. Seems like multiples errors in judgement from multiple parts of the organization.

(My wife left journalism about 15 years ago so maybe things are different but that was her initial reaction)

In this case, the article was quoting a blog post, so presumably the editor (it _does_ look like there was one) took the arguably-not-unreasonable stance that _obviously_ the author wouldn't have fabricated quotes from a blog post they're literally linking to, that would be _insane_, nobody would do that. And thus that they didn't need to check.

And that might be a semi-justifiable stance if dealing with a human.

One of the many problems with our good friends the magic robots is that they don't just do incorrect stuff, they do _weird_ incorrect stuff, that a human would be unlikely to do, so it can fly under the radar.

> My wife left journalism about 15 years ago so maybe things are different

Ya, they are quite different!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com